Abstract
Charles Brockden Brown is widely known as America’s first writer in the Gothic genre. From the horrors of yellow fever to disembodied voices, murder, and Indian captivity, Brown’s works lead the reader through the twists and turns of the dark side of human nature. While working within what was, in the late eighteenth century, a mainly European mode of writing, Brown depicted a uniquely American experience. In his Preface to his novel Edgar Huntly (1799), Brown wrote that he would replace the “[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners,” the “Gothic castles and chimeras” of Europe with “[t]he incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness,” which are far more suitable “to create his American tale.”1
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Healey, K. (2016). Dark Shadows in the Promised Land: Landscapes of Terror and the Visual Arts in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly . In: Yang, S., Healey, K. (eds) Gothic Landscapes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_2
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